South Korean devs Project Moon have decided against getting a non-awful English translation done, despite 18 months in early access, and this crosses from merely unfortunate into actively harmful to understanding the game. We're talking flat-pack furniture levels of half-translated incoherence here, with the added wrinkle that there's so much damn dialogue that the relatively simple concepts you actually need to know are left adrift in a sea of extremely enthusiastic gibberish. In other words, expect a lot of death.Įxpect also a lot of bewilderment. There are no shortcuts or hail Marys here, paid or otherwise. The presentation of the thing evokes that stuff so strongly, but the reality is that it's self-contained and cheerfully unforgiving. In another world, Lobotomy is a free-to-play mobile game in the vein of Fallout Shelter, in which you can spend Anomaly Crystals to speed up study times or buy superior psychic armour for your researchers. Your team of researchers/captors will slowly grow in ability and gain new equipment, but there's a high risk they'll get themselves murdered by an escaped anomaly, a meltdown of otherworldly energies or even that they'll panic themselves to death after a particularly gruelling encounter with a spectral granny or malevolent field of static. In practice, Lobotomy borrows as much from roguelites as it does management sims, though the side-on, cross-section, XCOM base view strongly suggests it's more like the latter.

Your job is to manage a team of researchers who can slowly tease out what these things are, come up with equipment to better survive contact with them, and stick 'em back in a cell once they inevitably escape.

That's the shtick here too: you're conscripted into a sinister organisation that keeps even more sinister creatures in its basement. Lobotomy Corp bases its theme upon the SCP Foundation, which, if you're not familiar with it, is a decade-old collaborative online storytelling project, based around a clandestine group that seeks to capture and study anomalous entities.

This supernatural research and containment sim straddles that treacherously thin line between brilliance and disaster, which is of course where all the most interesting games end up.

Lobotomy Corporation is an extremely simple game that's also about as complicated as building a microwave from scratch.

Scp game like fallout shelter